


Change

by Monochromely



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-27 02:33:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16693786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Monochromely/pseuds/Monochromely
Summary: “You keep saying that you’re not her,” she whispers. The room is so empty, so silent, and so cold, that her voice carries; it lands directly in front of his feet, so that he is made to look at it, made to grovel in her agony. Her arctic eyes are wide, heavy with horror, sagging. “And I don’t quite understand what that means.”Blue Diamond & Steven.





	Change

**Author's Note:**

> WE GOT AN AIRDATE!!!
> 
> (Have some angst that I started literally the moment after we did.)

_In the pink room, he dreams of the Diamond he now knows to be his mother—except he_ **_is_ ** _his mother. He stares through her eyes that are staring past the balcony and into Homeworld’s deep abyss._

_He owns all of this nothingness._

_(It is starting to crawl under his skin.)_

_“Duty,” he whispers. “Duty, duty, duty—always duty.”_

_When he turns around—slowly, like a ballerina in the middle of a pirouette—he finds himself face to face with the vague silhouette of Blue Diamond. She towers above him, a grand figure wrapped in the many layers of her dark cloak, an impenetrable mass in the darkness, monolithic, untouchable._

_He can’t see her eyes, but he_ **_can_ ** _see her frown—sharp and cold, an incision against her cerulean skin._

 _“There has to be more to being a Diamond than just_ **_duty_** _,” he complains. “All I do is wave to the crowd and order Pearls around, and then I get scolded by either you or Yellow for not ordering them around right. I’m sick of it! I want to do more! I want to…” He looks down at the temple of fingers just under his gem as his throat tightens, as his eyes well against his wishes. “I want to not feel so trapped.”_

 _“We’ve discussed this, Pink.” And they have; he can feel it in his gut, can almost see the memories of every time he has ever told the Diamonds that he wants more, that he wants to_ **_be_ ** _more. Blue Diamond’s voice is final, edged with the barest tint of frustration, and it lands like a precise blow. (At least Yellow is_ **_always_ ** _angry. At least he knows to expect that with her.) “You’re not ready to have a colony yet, and until you_ **_are_ ** _ready, you must carry out the other duties—yes,_ _duties—that come with the mantle of our positions. We are leaders, Pink. Rulers. Oftentimes, we must enact such trivial mannerisms to befit our lofted statuses.”_

_“You want me to be a figurehead,” he whispers as sturdy warmth slips unbidden from his eyes and down his pale cheeks, as Blue’s figure in the darkness suddenly begins to unfold and unbend, assuming shape and definition—a purpose. She extends a tall hand from her robes and places it ever so gently beneath his pointed chin. It is a tiny kindness, a mercy from the merciless Blue._

_“I want you to be happy with who you are,” she replies, softer now but only just. “For we—you and I and Yellow and White—will be like this… forever.”_

_The word is impossibly heavy._

_It is a lump in the column of his throat._

_It is Blue’s hand under his chin._

_It is the two hundred years he has lived._

_It is the one hundred thousand that White has known._

_Forever._

_And ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and—_

“Pink?”

Steven wakes with a start to find Blue Diamond towering above him, sharpened into painful distinction by the hazy lighting of the pink room. 

Her long, drooping face.

The spillage of her silvery hair.

The unmistakable sadness in her eyes, the dark grooves that seep like ink beneath them.

He doesn’t have to wonder how she came to be this way.

She tells it in even the way her delicate features contort as she says his name.

Well, not _his_ name.

But she hasn’t quite realized that yet.

“Sorry!” he yawns, pulling himself up into a sitting position and rubbing at his bleary eyes. “I was asleep.” But then he hesitates, bites his lip and opens his eyes a little fuller as the direness of his situation returns to him in a loud, confusing instant. 

He’s imprisoned in space.

_Again._

(He might need to _literally_ be grounded.)

“Yes, I noticed,” the Diamond frowns, tilting her head thoughtfully. “It’s an interesting Earth custom… strange, but I suppose you find that it has its benefits?”

Oh, right—he’d forgotten how little Homeworld gems know about humans. (Peridot is _still_ unlearning semi-derogatory terms for human anatomy.)

“Yeah,” he replies, pulling a sheepish hand across the back of his neck. “Uh, it makes you feel rested after a long day.”

 _Or a long five-thousand years_ , he cannot help but think, again drawn to the dark pools beneath Blue Diamond’s eyes.

(Would it take her five-thousand years more to ever be at peace again?)

“That’s nice,” she says, and he thinks she means it. There’s something in her face that longs to be present for him ( _her_ ), to make amends for having not been.

And it wrenches at him, twists his insides.

He needs to correct her now, needs to try at least, because... because he isn’t Pink.

He’s Steven, and he’s scared.

“Um… I need to, um..."

“I’m so glad you’re here, Pink,” she murmurs over him, all tenderness and quite possibly love. The sharp lines in her cerulean face soften. She looks less like a Diamond than she does Dr. Maheswaran when holding Connie tight or Barb watching Sadie perform or his mom in the home video—her dark eyes crinkled with the warmth of the sun, the warmth of her love. Blue lowers her tall hand, a clear invitation for him to climb on.

But she thinks that he’s _her_.

And he isn’t.

(He’s starting to realize that for himself.)

He stares at her proffered hand and tries to muster some impossible words, only to find that his throat is dry, and his brain might as well be alphabet soup with all the letters scrambled up.

(Somehow, it was _easier_ to just tell gems that he was his mother.)

“I’m… glad to be here, too,” he begins tentatively, “but my name is Steven, remember? Pink Diamond… was my mom.”

The sentence is still strange on his tongue.

A near oxymoron.

Rapper Pearl.

Neat Amethyst.

Uncool Dad.

Diamond Mom.

 _Blue_ Diamond frowns—in the very way she had done so in his most recent dream (memory?), her plump lips thinning into razor sharpness, into a coldness that burns him. She retracts her hand, pulls it protectively over her gem.

“It’s complicated,” he apologizes again. “Sorry about that.”

It’s not his fault—none of it is—but he _feels_ like it is.

He feels like his entire existence is a complication.

For Garnet, Amethyst, and Pearl.

For gems like Jasper and Bismuth and Nephrite.

For all of the corrupted.

For Yellow Diamond.

For the Diamond like a glass tower in front of him.

_I’m sorry._

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

“You keep saying that you’re not her,” she whispers. The room is so empty, so silent, and so cold, that her voice carries; it lands directly in front of his feet, so that he is made to look at it, made to grovel in her agony. Her arctic eyes are wide, heavy with horror, sagging. “And I don’t quite understand what that means.”

“Please, let me, ex—” But she cuts him off.

“ _How can you not be her?_ ” She suddenly cries, slashing through the air with her tall hands. The gem embedded in her chest takes on a frenzied glow, pulsing dangerously, a ticking time bomb. Steven looks around wildly, but there’s nowhere to run, nowhere to go. He inches backwards as fast as his fear and clumsy hands will let him. “How can you have her gem and not be _Pink Diamond?_ ”

The room, once pink, is flooded in blue.

And Blue Diamond begins to weep, the sound high and keening, raw and visceral, everywhere and violent and horrible and loud.

She collapses to her knees, and the world trembles in her wake.

Steven wants to wretch, wants to cry, wants to scream, wants his dad, wants the Gems to come take him away from this nightmare, but this isn’t a nightmare—it’s real life, and he’s living through it, _and, oh, God, make it stop._ He closes his mouth against the horror, but it leaks from his eyes anyway.

_I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry._

He clenches his stomach, feels the hard edges of his gem beneath his shirt, and wishes he could wrench it out of his body and present it to her on a silver platter.

If that would make her happy.

If that would make all of this end.

But it wouldn’t.

Life could never be so easy for either of them.

_I’m sorry._

Steven tries and fails to rise to his feet, bowled over by another wave of her grief.

But at least he tips forward this time, is at least able to crawl.

And so he crawls.

Elbow over tear-stained elbow, he pulls himself towards the prostrated Diamond.

(He isn’t sure why.)

_I’m sorry._

“I didn’t ask for this either!” he shouts above the noise—her weeping, his, the way these awful sounds echo off the walls. His labored breath hitches in his throat as he fights down her sobs, her revulsion and her anger, her fear and grief and hurt and confusion.

“ _You’re_ confused?” He laughs humorlessly.

“ _Silence!_ ” she demands. “You have no right to—”

“ _I’m_ confused. I’m sorry that you’re hurting, but it’s not just about _you_!”

Of course, it’s not the most _brilliant_ thing to shout at a grief-stricken dictator, but miraculously enough, it… does the trick.

Blue Diamond uncovers her pale face and... _hiccups_... so stunned by his boldness that she forgets to continue crying.

Her hands sink to the ground by her sides.

Her aura slowly fades with the interruption of her intensity.

Their faces still drip with her tears.

“She chose this form, you see,” Steven croaks, relieved that she’s listening or that she’s pretending to listen, that at least she’s stopped crying. “She chose to have me, chose to be half-human because she wanted to... experience _change_.”

_For we—you and I and Yellow and White—will be like this... forever._

“Which is something you’ve never really known,” he admits, remembering his dream, remembering the subtle sadness in her voice that she tried to pass off as comfort. Even though he’s only fourteen and a quarter, he has this vague feeling that forever isn’t a happy measurement to exist within. Sometimes, _days_ can feel like forever; he cannot even begin to imagine thousands upon thousands of years—all those days, weeks, hours, and seconds. What do you do with them? How do you distinguish one millennium from the next? “You’ve been the way that you are for a very long time…”

_I want you to be happy with who you are._

Steven staggers to his feet, wobbling a little as the world tilts on its drunken axis.

His sides, his chest, his head hurts as though he’s just run a marathon.

He grasps at his shirt.

Feels the hard edges of Pink Diamond beneath the soaked fabric.

And moves forward anyway.

“Keep away from me,” Blue rasps, her eyes wide and wild, those of a hunted, wounded animal—a far cry from the cold diplomat of his mother’s memory.

He obliges and collapses cross-legged just in front of her dripping face.

His very bones are exhausted.

She could squish him right now, and he’d probably thank her for it.

“I’m her son, and if I know one thing about her… I know that my very existence made her really happy.”

 _Because you're going to be something extraordinary,_ she said. _You’re going to be a human being._

Steven dares to reach out.

Dares to reach upwards and place his palm on Blue Diamond’s chin.

She recoils but only just.

It is a tiny concession, a mercy from the merciless Blue.

She is cold beneath his touch.

He wonders if she finds him warm.

Wonders if she can even feel him at all.

“Can I try to make you happy?”


End file.
